Angela Bassett: Steel and Silk

Angela Bassett has a reputation for playing strong women, but with How Stella Got Her Groove Back, she gets to soften her edges. Here, Bassett talks about playing a woman who falls for a guy half her age, discusses her real life with her new husband Courtney B. Vance and tells a sweet story about working with Ralph Fiennes.

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Angela Bassett is no stranger to strong women characters. As Tina Turner in What's Love Got to Do With It, she strutted, took it on the chin from Ike and shook a tail feather so authoritatively we almost forgot what the real Tina looked like. Then, as the sturdy Betty Shabazz in Spike Lee's Malcolm X, she survived watching her husband get gunned down in front of her. And who didn't side with her when, as Bernadine from Waiting to Exhale, she dumped her unfaithful husband's entire wardrobe into his BMW and set the whole damn thing on fire in the driveway. No question, Bassett knows how to play women of steel.

Now Bassett's playing another woman of steel, but this one's got a silk lining. As Stella, a fortyish single mother who goes to the tropics and falls in love with a guy half her age in How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Bassett gets to have soft edges and act sexy, confused and vulnerable.

On this particular day, Bassett has just come offstage at New York's Joseph Papp Public Theater, where she's been playing one of the steeliest women of all time--Lady Macbeth (opposite Alec Baldwin). After going berserk onstage for three hours, she's in her dressing room taking off her Medusa-like wig, slipping into sweatpants and a turtle-neck, and giving a kiss to her husband, actor Courtney B. Vance, who has just dropped in to bring her lunch (soup, half a sandwich and some chocolate-covered pretzels).

"This should do it," Vance says as he rubs his wife's shoulders and kisses her neck. Bassett smiles. They've been married since last October, but have yet to spend more than a few days together at their L.A. home because one or both of them has been working since the day after their wedding. Vance hugs Bassett one more time and leaves the room. "We're both looking forward to getting our lives back to normal," she says when he's gone.

"But with both of you being actors, it's never going to get back to normal," I point out.

Bassett takes this in. "Normal," she says, rolling the word around on her tongue for a while. "Well, 'normal' meaning that we'll get up in our own bed, make our own breakfast, be with each other until one of us has to go on location. As an actor, I'm used to life changing all the time, and so is my husband. So what seems normal to us may not seem normal to two people who have regular jobs."

"Angela," I say, noticing how delicately pretty Bassett is when she's not playing a fierce, sturdy female on a gigantic movie screen, "give it up. You have no chance with this 'normal' thing."

"Well it's a good thing I'm only in New York for a few months." Bassett throws her head back and laughs. "I used to live in New York, but I was not living then like I am now. Those funky old apartments, and now, this." Her hand sweeps around to encompass the plush little dressing room, the flowers and the notes of congratulations.

Raised in the projects in St. Petersburg, Florida, Bassett knew she wanted to act when she saw James Earl Jones portray Lenny in Of Mice and Men at the Kennedy Center on a class trip to Washington, DC. An almost religious dedication to studying earned her National Honor Society membership and a scholarship to Yale, where she got an undergraduate degree and a master's at the prestigious Yale School of Drama. Then she spent a few years in New York making a name for herself as a stage actress (in plays such as August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone) before moving to Los Angeles in 1988 to pursue a movie career. Three years later, John Singleton cast her as Cuba Gooding Jr.'s no-nonsense mom in the breakout Boyz N the Hood, and she was off and running. The following year she starred in Malcolm X and went on to do the TV miniseries The Jacksons: An American Dream. Then along came What's Love Got to Do With It, which earned her an Oscar nomination. Kathryn Bigelow's futuristic Strange Days, in which Bassett starred with Ralph Fiennes, was a coup for the actress when she won her role in it, and nobody blamed her for the mess that resulted. Waiting to Exhale, adapted from the novel by Terry McMillan, who also wrote How Stella Got Her Groove Back, put her back in the money.

"I've just spent the last few days watching your movies," I tell Bassett. "Can I just pick a little bone with you?"

"Sure," she says, seeming genuinely eager to have a discussion.

"What's with all those men in Waiting to Exhale? Not one of them knew how to make love to a woman. These guys would jump on their girlfriends and then roll off and start snoring. What about foreplay? Is that unheard of? If a guy ever screwed me like that, I'd kill him."

To say that Bassett is speechless is an understatement. Her jaw has dropped and she's staring at me.

"Sorry," I say. "I figured everybody must wonder about that."

"God, I don't know what to say," Bassett finally says. "There was lots of flak after the movie came out, because there were people who were upset with the way black men had been portrayed. But I don't think that is exactly what they had in mind. They just thought the men couldn't commit or that they were liars. But this whole sex thing, let me think it over for a minute."

Bassett closes her eyes and takes a few breaths. She's still for so long I wonder if she's meditating. Then she opens her eyes slowly, and seems to have the whole thing figured out.

"It's funny," she says in that deep, throaty voice of hers. "If you love someone, really love someone, love their heart and soul and spirit and who they are and what they stand for, then they feel comfortable with you and you with them, and they don't fear that you're going to push them away because their sexual prowess is not where you think it ought to be. Or you'll take the time and show them and teach them. You develop patience. But if you really don't know them, you just sort of lust after them and think they're really cute or you're interested in them for other reasons, maybe what they represent or, often times the way they look....

"Well, when you rush the physical relationship, maybe they're a little clumsy and a little nervous and sometimes it doesn't work out the way you hoped. If they don't knock it out of the park--just to use an expression--if they don't match up to your standards right away, then suddenly you're not interested in who they are as much. That's when they start getting your answering machine instead of you. One day he's making the back of your neck tingle and the next, you can't stand to be in the same room with him. And I think the men and women in Waiting to Exhale, at least the scenes you're talking about with Lela Rochon's character or Whitney Houston's character, well, those relationships were all based on quick physical intimacy instead of a real, shared feeling of love. Does that answer your question?"

Question? What question? I'm voting for Bassett for president.

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